Self Evaluation

As I have progressed through the projects we have been given I have noticed many areas that I need to improve upon throughout my future years at NUA. One of the main areas that I noticed throughout the projects (and knew I needed to work on before starting at NUA also) is the anatomy of the human body and the anatomy of faces, I'd very much say anatomy is one of my weakest areas by a large amount, its definitely something I'll need to be focusing on in my own time. Another area is lighting and composition. With some of my drawings my lighting is very hit and miss and quite inconsistent. This is something I need to practice more so I can be more reliable when it comes to adding lighting to a piece of work, lighting is a very important factor in paintings since if a drawing is really good but the lightings off it makes the drawing look a whole lot worse and on the other end, if the drawing is okay but the lighting is good then the drawings going to look a lot better.

Insect Project - Whilst working on the Insect project I tried to paint it all myself without using many images as reference and no photo textures. This I believe restricted my final piece because it could have been much better in my opinion, if I maybe used a texture on the rocks or and used more references to paint from my final piece would have liked much better. This is a habit I have when it comes to drawing, before the course I barely used reference imagery if not none at all and now I'm seeing the advantage of using it. On a positive note, I haven't drawn on a graphics tablet much at all and my drawings on the tablet are getting better, not as good as my drawings from other sources (like my iPad for example) but they're still improving. I think the amount of preparation I had (4 silhouettes pages and multiple iterations) will show how much I thought about the ideas I had, however, I don't think my final piece was completed to a great standard.

Time Piece Project - In the Time Piece project I learned from the couple of mistakes I mentioned in the Insect Project and tried using more reference images and followed a couple of tutorials for my crystal design. This helped me a huge amount, at the start of the project I was afraid that it would end up like my insect project and the actual time piece wouldn't look that realistic and it turned out better than I thought it would, it could still be improved obviously with more details added and some better lighting added to it (which I still need to practice) but I'm pressed with how it turned out. I also experimented with colour a bit more in this project, before the course I used to draw in black and white then overlay the colour on top but using actual colour gives much better results. I believe the work and final result I created meets the project brief.

Tinderbox Project - When I realised we would have to be drawing a character I knew I may struggle since anatomy isn't my specialty, I did better than I thought I would do but my drawings still weren't up to par (in my opinion) because anatomy is one of my weakest points like I mentioned before. I did look at quite a lot of reference imagery for my character hair and clothes etc but I didn't actually look at any references for body shapes or forms, I only used the wooden mannequin I had  on my desk which probably restricted the outcome of my drawings. I think I have covered enough work for the brief I just don't think the quality of the work is that high for this project.

One last point that I need to work on is just general time management, I managed to get everything finished fine I just ended up doing no work for a couple of days then a huge stint in one night and kept repeating. It would be better to do a bit every day instead of leaving myself to do a large chunk of a project all in one night because if I'm working longer I'm probably going to be more tired and won't do the work to as good a standard as I would have done if I had a good nights sleep.